Every day, people post questions on Stack Overflow that need migration to SF, SU, or meta (which, by the way, sucks since a lot of those people don't have access to SU yet). People seem to have a tendency to downvote these questions, even if it isn't necessarily a "bad" question (which is when downvotes are sanctioned, correct?).

6 Answers
6

A commentator on Kip's answer mentions that the people asking questions in the wrong place (i.e. So instead of SF) obviously didn't read the FAQ. I understand this as saying that not having read the FAQ is grounds for downvoting, basically as a punishment.

I completely disagree with that point of view.
I think we should not downvote questions that are candidates for migration, because that sort of behaviour is disruptive and counterproductive. Only in very exceptional cases is a downvote justified.

If you want to encourage the right behaviour, you should point people in the right direction and give them a little nudge (by voting to migrate the question, and leaving a comment saying please read the FAQ, for example). Downvoting as a punishment does not entice the desired behaviour, in the contrary. People will feel offended and may even react with disruptive behaviour (starting a flame war, spamming the site with OT questions, aquiring a little reputation so they can leave mean comments, or downvote randomly). We don't want newcomers to go away feeling that SO sucks, you know, the people there are really narrow minded. We want them to stay and become valuable members of the community. Only people who don't want to become one of those members should be encouraged to stay away from the site.
In my opinion the downvote on a question should be reserved to those cases.

It is kind of a punishment for not asking the question in the right place to begin with. (Not saying I necessarily agree with it, depending on the circumstances.) With the kinds of subjective/discussion questions that belong on Meta, in particular, I think people still have the gut reaction to downvote those things into oblivion, forgetting that there actually is a place for them now.

Your question gets moved if it isn't posted in the right place, hence whoever asked it did not read the FAQ to see what questions are acceptable. This is void however if the post is older than the site where it should be moved.
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Ian ElliottJul 26 '09 at 4:29

If I see a question on StackOverflow titled: "My iPod won't charge - help me ASAP!" then I would vote to port it over to SuperUser (because I have enough Rep that I can) but for many, many StackOverflow users they don't have enough Rep to do this (yet) thus all they can do is down vote the question to show that the question doesn't belong here.